NASA: Nobody's Going To Mars Without Our Help

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Honestly, If I am going to be shot out into space on a one way trip to Mars, I'd definitely want NASA's help.

NASA's top priority is still taking humans to Mars, and it says private companies who want to do the same don't stand a chance without its support. Administrator Charles Bolden told a US House budget committee, "our ultimate focus is the journey to Mars and everything comes back to that," adding that the agency still plans to land there by the 2030s.
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Roomba for the lawn will leave zig zagging lines all over it and it will leave small patches of uncut grass :D
 
yea, lets leave it up to nasa as the final say so... first its 2030's, then it'll be 2040's, 2050's.. then before you know it we still havent been back to the moon yet, let alone mars.

We need nasa's help, expertise, but not their slow way of doing things.

i say, skip all the gov bs and stick to privatization, pay off whoever it takes to warp speed our interplanetary transportation.
 
NASA isn't going to Mars until it's possible to bring the astronauts home again also. The private firms are looking at a 1-way trip. Those are very different missions.
 
The folks that have signed up for the Mars mission on that reality TV show are in for a death trap. Once the funding dries up how are they going to survive without new supplies?

I can imagine 50 years from now NASA having to go get any remaining survivors.
 
poor nasa
karzo.jpg
 
NASA isnt going to Mars until they start getting the sort of funding they actually need.

All those private investors should just start pooling money/resources with NASA to get the job done that our government wont.
 
We are a government agency and we are not going to let you do anything without someone giving us lots of money first!
 
It's certainly a good idea to use the moon as a launching pad, and may happen before the actual trip to mars, but it's not as great a marketing slogan
 
Carouselambra said:
I'm confused why a moon base isn't priority #1 as some sort of launching point to other places..
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Other planets are millions of miles away, the moon shaves off a mere 250,000 miles from the journey. The resources saved from overcoming the earth's gravity/atmosphere are not worth the complexity of establishing a secondary launch pad on the moon.
 
Carouselambra said:
I'm confused why a moon base isn't priority #1 as some sort of launching point to other places..
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A Moon base is a waste of resources as a launch point, because there's not much in the way of useful materials on the Moon to use as building materials, or fuel for any things that are going to launch elsewhere, and if you're just ferrying stuff to the Moon, then launching from the Moon you're using more energy/resources in the long run. I know a lot of people like to go "oooh Helium3 is abundant on the Moon's surface" yeah so? what rocket fuel is made out of nothing but Helium3?

Now if you want to make a Moon base to see if it can be done remotely, I think that's a fair point, but why don't you just try on Earth and actually handicap the building process, i.e. no bringing in huge cranes, flatbeds of material when needed, crews of Mexican day laborers...
 
TorxT3D said:
yea, lets leave it up to nasa as the final say so... first its 2030's, then it'll be 2040's, 2050's.. then before you know it we still havent been back to the moon yet, let alone mars.

We need nasa's help, expertise, but not their slow way of doing things.

i say, skip all the gov bs and stick to privatization, pay off whoever it takes to warp speed our interplanetary transportation.
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The problem is NASA isn't getting the budget they need. When the gov. was serious about going to the moon due to the space race with the Soviets, NASA got everything they needed and they managed to do it.

I think Dr Neil Tyson made some very compelling arguments about why private industry will never be the one to push the frontier. Private industry is all about investment, and you cannot make an investment when you are doing something dangerous and you're unable to quantify the cost and the risk.

We will still need NASA to be the first to go to Mars, to learn how to make the journey to Mars and back a safe one. Then the private industry can come in, work with NASA and make it efficient while NASA continues to push the frontier elsewhere. So the private industry can play a role, but their role comes after NASA's role.
 
Limahl said:
NASA isnt going to Mars until they start getting the sort of funding they actually need.

All those private investors should just start pooling money/resources with NASA to get the job done that our government wont.
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Keyword "investors". What you really mean is "donations", since there is no value in traveling to Mars there can be no return on your investment. Going to Mars will be nothing more than "for fun". I'd gladly pay an extra $200 a year in taxes if it meant NASA could launch a Mars mission in 10 years. They probably need about 1-2 trillion dollars to make this happen, at least within that timeframe.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Now if you want to make a Moon base to see if it can be done remotely, I think that's a fair point, but why don't you just try on Earth and actually handicap the building process, i.e. no bringing in huge cranes, flatbeds of material when needed, crews of Mexican day laborers...
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Eh, thats like saying if you want to build a moon rocket just practice with bottle rockets instead. Eventually you'll have to commit to the real thing to expose all the weaknesses engineers will overlook. A functional moonbase would be great practice for a Mars base, but I imagine an actual Mars trip will just consist of flying there and back over the period of 2.5 years living out of something the size of a LEM for 6 months on the surface. It would be pretty brutal and I actually feel bad for any astronauts that do it.
 
Carouselambra said:
I'm confused why a moon base isn't priority #1 as some sort of launching point to other places..
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Bolden thinks he is going to find a flying carpet on one of his cultural outreach trips. (/sarcasm)

You are 110% correct. The moon as a stepping stone to other space destinations is the only feasible plan that brings back its own scientific and commercial benefits. Human spaceflight is simply not ready for Mars. It is ready to begin an outpost on the moon, and then we work our way out to asteroids and eventually Mars.
 
McFry said:
Eh, thats like saying if you want to build a moon rocket just practice with bottle rockets instead. Eventually you'll have to commit to the real thing to expose all the weaknesses engineers will overlook. A functional moonbase would be great practice for a Mars base, but I imagine an actual Mars trip will just consist of flying there and back over the period of 2.5 years living out of something the size of a LEM for 6 months on the surface. It would be pretty brutal and I actually feel bad for any astronauts that do it.
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Not really, you'd build a real base, you'd use only what materials would be available either locally or the small amounts that you can bring via rocket, you'd put the same building restrictions as far as equipment used, hell even if it's human's building it directly. Then when something breaks down you can have people look at it from all angles to find out why it broke. Building a Moon base would cost billions, and those are billions that are better spent just going to Mars.

And while people going to Mars would probably live in extremely Spartan conditions, they still would need some larger structures if for anything to grow food. And that's where most of the square footage for any Mars base will be. Considering the Sun is only about 45% as bright at Mars plants are going to be growing much slower.
 
Limahl said:
NASA isnt going to Mars until they start getting the sort of funding they actually need.

All those private investors should just start pooling money/resources with NASA to get the job done that our government wont.
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We do live in a different economy than we did in the 60's when the feds could put 5% of our budget to NASA. We also wanted to beat the USSR at that time.

The US government for the past 30 years is more worried about fighting amongst them self over partisan issues than worrying about making us the best.

I'm not sure if they do this, but if they don't, I can't understand how NASA and the DoD are not more intertwined. The US government loves giving the DoD blank checks. Why can't NASA develop and share rocket/space technology with the enviable near-earth orbit defense systems.
 
"Nobody's Doing <X> Without Our Help"

That's what the person scared of someone else getting something done says.
 
Laureolus said:
"Nobody's Doing <X> Without Our Help"

That's what the person scared of someone else getting something done says.
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Or they want to be realistic about people not committing suicide in space due to it take more resources to have a chance of being safe than would be profitable to a private company.
 
If you could manufacture rocket fuel from materials on the moon it makes a lot of sense to use it as a springboard due to the efficiency of launching from the lower gravity environment of that location. And it's closeness to Earth makes it a great place to test and develop technologies that will be helpful for surviving longer trips inside the solar system.
 
tetris42 said:
Or they want to be realistic about people not committing suicide in space due to it take more resources to have a chance of being safe than would be profitable to a private company.
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Or they want a monopoly on the next big mission, lest they become exposed as irrelevant.
 
Nobody is going to Mars. At least not in our lifetimes. Our space program has regressed in technology so much and is so poorly funded that we couldn't even do another manned mission to the moon at this point.
 
jpm100 said:
Or they want a monopoly on the next big mission, lest they become exposed as irrelevant.
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Thats a nice random accusation to make based on absolutely nothing, but considering the experience and credentials and difficulty of task at hand, I think it's best we listen to the experts. Shhhh, just shhhh...
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Nobody is going to Mars. At least not in our lifetimes. Our space program has regressed in technology so much and is so poorly funded that we couldn't even do another manned mission to the moon at this point.
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We have a inhabited an entire planet with robots, landed on a moving asteroid, taken the most detailed analysis of planets we could never hope to approach, and have an orbiting space station floating around the planet. You're seriously going to sit there all grumpy and say we have regressed? We're putting our money where we need it. Man wants to explore distant celestial bodies then probes are the way to do it, not sending people on expensive joy rides just so they can have the satisfaction of saying they put their foot down on it.
 
There are plenty of perfectly practical, even profitable endeavors NASA could attempt with the right funding and marketing.

How about capturing a metallic asteroid and putting it in (lunar) orbit...then mining it.
Obviously it would be an ideal source of material for large structural portions of future space exploration craft.
But it would also serve to upset world metals markets, particularly the rare earth mineral markets the Chinese currently dominate.

It's got profit, political leverage, resource independence, and future exploration all tied into a single project. Sounds like a winner, all NASA needs is the right marketing team.
 
McFry said:
Thats a nice random accusation to make based on absolutely nothing, but considering the experience and credentials and difficulty of task at hand, I think it's best we listen to the experts. Shhhh, just shhhh...
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Other than NASA's statement sounded more like a threat than advice.

What experience? The bulk of NASA's good experience in manned missions is long retired or passed. That ignores the fact NASA's prolific era in general has long passed. And also when it came to making anything NASA was a contractor. They hired people to build it. So much of the know how existed outside NASA in companies most of which don't exist anymore. And even when they played the roll of contractor well its because they were staffed with people drawn from the military and industry who were appropriately skilled to do so. Not a bunch of people that could have checked the Hubble telescope mirror's curvature with a pen laser, a piece of paper and a ruler, but chose not to do so.
 
While in other news, martians realize what we are and plan to do everything they can to keep us off their planet.
Marvin-the-Martian.jpg
 
sfsuphysics said:
And while people going to Mars would probably live in extremely Spartan conditions, they still would need some larger structures if for anything to grow food. And that's where most of the square footage for any Mars base will be. Considering the Sun is only about 45% as bright at Mars plants are going to be growing much slower.
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Couldn't they use a large field of Mylar mirrors (200% or more of the greenhouse area) to focus enough light to replicate (or exceed) earth light levels?

Some plants can tolerate a higher amount of light normal, causing them to grow much faster than normal. If you can get the plants to grow faster, then the amount of pressurized greenhouse space can be reduced. Alternately, that extra space could be used for "luxuries" like spices.
 
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